The new year is always difficult for me. I don’t like thinking about the next 12 months, like looking at a cold pool before diving into it. I’m much better at one day at a time. No, I don’t attend AA, but as a friend once said, I don’t do new year’s.
This new year was particularly difficult, coming with loads of anxiety. Part of the anxiety had to do with the weather, as mundane and crazy as that sounds. Despite the deluges in the first half of January, I worried that Winter would end any day and that the heat and dry weather would come all too soon. For the last several years, New Year’s Day turned balmy, right in time for the Rose Parade, and it just got warmer and dryer after that. Last year, there was no rain, no rain at all, in January, February and March – the rainy months here.
My sister was down from the Bay Area this week and drove home yesterday, a day earlier than she planned, because she didn’t want to drive back in the storm, another storm, that was coming. This morning, a friend who dropped by in the rain after spending a few months up north commented on the “record-breaking weather California is having.”
The change in the weather has been dramatic and leaves me with mixed feelings – hopefully not more anxiety! - as I explored, literally, in my latest Claremont Courier column, which came out a week ago.
A CHANGE IN THE CLIMATE AND IN PERSPECTIVE
It was only a month or so ago, in January and even February, that I was complaining that there was never any snow below Baldy Village. Or that there was barely any in the village.
At least not for a long time.
I was telling friends about the time I went up Baldy Road, and there was no snow, or barely any, until I went into one of the tunnels and came out, suddenly, into a white wonderland. I couldn’t remember if it happened 15 years ago or if I remembered 15 years ago that it had happened years earlier.
In any case, it was years since there was snow in the village or much below the Icehouse Canyon turn-off. I would often go up when it looked from here in town like the snow was low only to find no snow in the village, much less at the tunnels. I would feel like Charlie Brown fooled again by Lucy with the football. (At least it was nice up there. Going up there is never a waste of time.)
It was something like 10 years ago that a friend and I had breakfast at the Baldy Lodge, enjoying the freshly made cinnamon buns, when there was snow melting outside. It has been at least that long since there was a thin layer of snow covering the field at the school at the entrance of the Village.
What a difference a storm makes.
Or at least the unusual, record-breaking, cold storm that ushered in the last weekend of February. I had been reading about it and hearing friends talk about it snowing in Upland and Montclair, but then I saw glimpses of the hills between the low covered in white – not just for the morning but for two, three, four days. Then, I knew it wasn’t just hype.
On that Monday morning – it was not only not crowded but also turned out to be between storms if not between raindrops – I ventured up Baldy Road to Baldy Village, wanting to see what I used to see.
Well, I got what I wanted – and then some. And then some.
There were patches of snow soon after the incline began. By the time we were at the Shin Road turn-off, quite a bit below the tunnels, the snow was all-present. In fact, traffic was being stopped to let a snow plow pass. So much for just wishing there was snow at the tunnels like I remembered. This was serious.
Very serious, as was evident when the village came into view. The field wasn’t covered with a pretty layer of white, as I pictured in my head from years past. The field was gone, lost, buried in more than a few inches of snow. I thought of having heard that the school was closed for snow days – snow days near Claremont! – and knew it wasn’t all fun and games.
This was all the more clear further into the village. Snow was piled in all-too-perfect formation on top of cars, many of which were trapped, so to speak, with piles snow blocking their way out of driveways. I wondered if these people were stuck in their houses partially hidden by snow.
For all my fond memories of snow in Baldy Village and even at the tunnel, I had never seen snow quite like this, at least not up there. Maybe the snow, if there was this much, had always been shoveled or was melting away when I went up. This wasn’t exactly the stuff of fond memories. This was, again, serious, even alarming. I understood why a couple I know who live in Baldy Village were “camping out” in Claremont.
I had seen enough, and rain was starting to fall again upon arriving back in Claremont. I wanted some change in the weather but perhaps not this much change. Indeed, “climate change” is a better term than “global warming.” At least it stops the deniers in their tracks.
All I wanted was a bit of rain now and then, for the heat and dry weather to hold off for two or three months, until April or maybe even May. This wasn’t quite what I had in mind.
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